Hello all, I am new to EW and Reaper. My question is this: I don't have a MIDI keyboard and have always imputed notes by hand in the past. I just edit all the qualities of the note in the software. That's how I write best. I am wondering how I am supposed to control volume for sustained notes in Hollywood brass and others. From all I could find, the velocity is set on sustained and cannot be changed. I also read that one can adjust volume using modulation and expression. However, I didn't find a single article telling me how to do that. All I found were CC1 and CC11 and I have no idea what those are. I can't seem to find any module wheel to control either of these things and I am very confused. Would anyone be able to explain this for me?

I'm assuming you've already worked out how to add in Play as an instrument track in Reaper. All this stuff is a lot easier to do if you have a MIDI keyboard, but you can still get things working without one.

From a starting point where you have, for example, the 6 French Horns sustain patch (that uses CC 1 for dynamics, which is usually controlled by a keyboard's modulation wheel) on a track, you can:

Create a MIDI item on the track where you've going to record. Either by simply recording and playing something, you can always delete the notes later, or by clicking and dragging along the timeline to select a region then choosing "Insert > New MIDI item" from the menus.

Double click the MIDI item to edit it. By default I think you'll get the main piano key-roll and notes matrix, with a lane down below for showing note velocities.

Click the little + next to the Velocity header. That will add another lane to the display - which will show note release velocities by default, from memory.

Now click the dropdown with the name of this new lane, and choose the "01 Mod Wheel" heading from the list. You can now just click and/or drag (right click to delete) in the new lane to add CC 1 values as needed.

That's the basic idea, and you can do the same thing with CC 11 of course. There are certainly other ways to input CC data in Reaper but that should get you started.